Pasta

I don’t remember why I decided I *really* wanted to stuff and cook manicotti. I suspect it may have had something to do with the utter triumph of stuffing pierogi back in May. We made two kinds: sausage with red sauce, and spinach with ricotta (obviously, the photo is of the spinach variety). Both were good, but the spinach was really great. I’m excited to make these again sometime. Gastronomike says he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about: they were good, but it’s basically lasagna in a different shape.

A while back R. picked up a vegetarian cookbook called Super Natural Cooking. We picked this recipe out a while ago, and I think it could be a real go-to meal over the summer. If you make the asparagus puree (which was very close to an asparagus pesto) ahead of time it would be something you could literally throw together in five minutes, and it’s really good. I only wish we would have had the pine nuts that the recipe called for! This could probably also be easily adapted productively. You could add sausage, or capers, or even sun dried tomatoes.

Most of the time we try to keep this blog focused on moderately healthy meals. This is an exception. There’s really nothing healthy about this, but after a pretty hectic couple of weeks for the both of us, it hit the spot.

We’ve tried lots of baked & stovetop macaroni & cheese recipes in the past, but all of them seemed to be mising something. So I started from an Alton Brown recipe, dialed up the seasoning and added paprika and chiles, and wound up with a winner, if I do say so myself.

This made an excellent lunch. Light, easy, and a great way to use up several cucumbers that were past their prime. I did make the unfortunate choice to use soup pasta that happens to be shaped exactly like cucumber seeds, and so it was easy to perceive all the pasta as seeds. But that’s easily fixed for next time. I’d say this is yet another winner from the great soup-only cookbook.

I love pesto. I mean *seriously* love it. I love pestos of all kinds. One of the best things about pestos during summer is that you don’t even need to warm them and heat up the kitchen. Just blend the raw ingredients and serve at room temperature over recently drained pasta. We made a delicious asparagus pesto a few nights ago.

Because we keep getting bunches and bunches of fresh basil from our farmshare, in addition to the basil we’ve been growing ourselves, R. has been making a lot of pesto in our blender. When we had a Labor Day picnic on tap, then, she went right into making a pasta salad. It was fantastic! No picture today, sadly. You can find the original recipe here.

This was a surprisingly good pasta dish with a nice sweet-tasting sauce that was not too heavy. I’d adapted it from an original recipe that called for shallots, port, tomato paste and a lot less garlic. Instead, I put in more garlic, red wine, and some of the fresh cherry tomatoes from our farm share. It was good as leftovers, as well. I’d definitely make it again!